Student Reference Library

Student Reference Library is a multimedia reference works that at the time blew away much of the competition in CD-ROM reference works by incorporating access to huge Internet resources along with the vast amounts of information on the disc itself.

It started with the text of well-known references, including the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, the American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus and the 1996 Information Please Almanac.

If you didn't have a Web browser, you could install Spry Mosaic, the browser that Internet Explorer was based on. If you already had a browser installed, the software would link to it and then connect to the Internet to pull in information to augment the books.

To do this, the authors of the software incorporated the needed Internet addresses into the text of each entry in each book. So when you look up Aberdeen, Scotland, you would also have had access to a hot link that took you to a large number of Web sites associated with that city.

Another feature allowed you to copy the books onto your hard drive, instead of using the CD-ROM.

[Chicago Business Tribune. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1996-09-01/business/9609010185_1_cd-rom-microsoft-internet-explorer-web-browser. URL Accessed: 2013-04-16 12:00PM)